the sky above, the mud below

One dark night I found myself in the Selkirk Mountains standing on the highway trying to catch a ride. I looked up and just about fell over. I'd never seen anything like it before. So many stars, billions of them, and so close I could almost grab a handful. I was literally awestruck. Stars the size of grapefruits, brilliant white in a black sky. Al old Pontiac pulled up into the gravel and I climbed in. A guy not much older than myself, maybe twenty or so, was drunk and pissed off. He'd been thrown out of a bar and was heading east about twenty miles to the next town with a bar. Ten minutes later there were two women standing in the gravel, thumbs out. Get in the back he tells me. One for me and one for you. So I got out and he tells the thin one to climb in beside him and the fat one gets in with me in the back. I was interested in neither of them, but what could I do? So I sat there in the back with mine and we both stared out our windows while he starts going at it up front. Driving and grabbing at her. Pretty soon he pulls over and and they're going full blast and I ask mine her name, where they're going, etc. She doesn't seem to care either way about any of it. Pretty soon they're done up front and the guy falls asleep. The three of us get out, they go off somewhere and I continue east, gaping at the glorious sky, listening for cars. There may be a point to this story.

the next president

Among the many lunatics I've come to know and love (or hate) in my life, there was this guy I knew briefly around 1968 who was known only as "Mac", which was short for "mechanic" since he fixed things. He never spoke, he just stayed in the background and when something needed to be fixed, like a gas generator, he'd take it apart and fix it. He never even said his name was Mac - it's just what we called him because there was nothing else to go by. One night a bunch of us were sitting around shooting the breeze and suddenly Mac opened up. He told us that he had been followed around for years, in California, by phone company vans; that they had got hold of him and implanted electronic devices in his brain; that they had planned to make him president of the United States; that he would be known as President Andrew McAllister. The name seemed perfectly presidential and so I felt that although the man was utterly nuts, it might be a good idea, just in case, to keep an eye on future U.S. presidential events. One day, sometime later, he came by the house where I'd been staying. This was within a day or two of the July 20, 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. Mac paced wildly around the house talking non-stop in an incomprehensible (to me) language. He was extremely agitated. Then he left and we never saw him again. If, by 2012, there is no President Andrew McAllister, I will assume he lied.

a reader writes

taking your writing to the next level, (as i perceive it), is the structuring -- the content is already definitely in the bag. your writing is top notch and as unique to you as vonnegut's was to him, salinger, allan g., and dostoevsky's was to them.. as finished as any masterpiece that can't be finished can be... -- eat your heart out schubert -- and has had me crackin up out loud -- even when i wasn't stoned -- times too numerous to mention, not to mention trembling with anticipation, desire and longing as I read about your romantic exploits on the road and other locations... or pressed to rethink my philosophy on tobacco, fate, religion while expanding my knowledge of good music, entertained by behind the curtain anecdotes of the geniuses of jazz, and their underground worker bees of the Cellar, City Lights's all over the world as they cross paths with our fav bo-beat-hemianik photojournalist java advocate, whose enlightened taste in chicks, riffs, riff raff and the body politik make this world more than a bit more enjoyable, encouraged to spend more time contemplating beauty, music and the meaninglessness of meaning, and importance of pleasure. your friend, j d clement

Guest post : Milt Hinton, Geoff Dyer

There are lots of really good books of jazz photos. (Books by Wiliam Claxton, Jimmy Katz, Bob Parent, Herman Leonard, Francis Wolff, etc., are just a few that spring immediately to my mind.) But far and away my favourite of the few I own is Milt Hinton's "Bass Line ". Bassist Milt Hinton played and recorded with just about everyone, till his death in 2000. He also had a camera with him most of the time and his pictures capture something none of the others could because he was an insider. He shot his friends under casual circumstances, in private or personal moments. He was an amateur (in the best sense of the word) but also a skilled photographer, so he produced a rich treasury, glimpses into the world of jazz of the classic era. Geoff Dyer wrote an amazing and unusual book of jazz stories in a style he calls "imaginative criticism". Based on true life stories and photographs of a handful of jazz luminaries, he's composed tales – part fantasy, part biography – that are meant to convey impressionistic rather than literal truth. Rather than being about jazz, they are jazz, in a way. Hinton's photo below, and Dyer's commentary, which I first came across almost twenty years ago, have had a influence on how I think about photography, jazz, memory, and life. A Note on Photographs by Geoff Dyer PHOTOGRAPHS SOMETIMES WORK on you strangely and simply: at first glance you see things you subsequently discover are not there. Or rather, when you look again you notice things you initially didn't realise were there. In Milt Hinton's photograph of Ben Webster, Red Allen and Pee Wee Russell, for example, I thought that Allen's foot was resting on the chair in front of him, that Russell was actually drawing on his cigarette, that ... The fact that it is not as you remember it is one of the strengths of Hinton's photograph (or any other for that matter), for although it depicts only a split-second the felt duration of the picture extends several seconds either side of that frozen moment to include - or so it seems - what has just happened or is about to happen: Ben tilting back his hat and blowing his nose, Red reaching over to take a cigarette from Pee Wee ... Oil paintings leave even the Battles of Britain or Trafalgar strangely silent. Photography, on the other hand, can be as sensitive to sound as it is to light. Good photographs are there to be listened to as well as looked at; the better the photograph the more there is to hear. The best jazz photographs are those saturated in the sound of their subject. In Carol Reiff's photo of Chet Baker on-stage at Birdland we hear not just the sound of the musicians as they are crowded into the small stage of the frame but the background chat and clinking glasses of the nightclub. Similarly, in Hinton's photo we hear the sound of Ben turning the pages of the paper, the rustle of cloth as Pee Wee crosses his legs. Had we the means to decipher them, could we not go further still and use photographs like this to hear what was actually being said? Or even, since the best photos seem to extend beyond the moment they depict, what has just been said, what is about to be said . . . Photograph of Red Allen, Ben Webster, and Pee Wee Russell (1957) from Bass Line by Milt Hinton. Text by Geoff Dyer, from But Beautiful , 1991.

photo by jillian lebeck